After November

Win or lose the presidency in 2020 election, the Democrats are failing as a political party. They're headed for the same encyclopedia entry as the Whigs.

Getting rid of Trump is essential, but it is only a first step. After Nov, we have to come to grips with the reality that the Democratic Party's allegiance to corporate power is unshakable. New forms of political action are necessary. New organizations have to be created to represent working people and the middle class. As much as possible, Sanders' "revolution" must be formalized. There are models for what might happen next: from the militant labor action of the sort that created the vibrant middle class, the civil rights movement and the Mobilization Against the War to the Occupy Movement, the Women's March and the children's fight for gun control

Whether Joe Biden wins or Donald Trump does, we can't return to the neoliberal governance that made Trump possible in the first place. Trump may be gone but the need for universal health care, the housing catastrophe, decaying infrastructure, failing welfare state, endless war and climate change will still be with us. On their own, corporate Democrats cannot be counted on to do anything about any of it. It's up to us.

Not Us, You

So when, as is likely, the nomination is stolen from him at the Democratic
Convention, will Bernie Sanders 1) concede as he did in 2016 and try

to get the "us" in his campaign slogan to fall in line behind Joe Biden or Michael Bloomberg or whatever member of the kleptocracy the Democratic poobahs have chosen as designated hitman (which millions of "us" will probably perceive as a betrayal); 2) lead his delegates out of the convention to continue the fight in the streets; 3) declare the Democratic Party null and void and conduct an independent campaign; 4) convert his campaign into an independent political movement to organize the people to take on the political class; or 5) use his political organization as the starting place to create a new progressive party to take on the parties of the center and the right in 2022 and beyond?

The Party’s Over: Bernie’s Last Dance With the Dems by Jim Kavanaugh (CounterPunch)

Building Economic Democracy One Worker Co-op at a Time

A worker cooperative is a business that is owned and democratically governed by the people who work in it.

Own the Change, a 22 minute, free documentary produced by TESA Collective and the Laura Flanders Show, is a guide to starting worker co-ops. The video lays out the the real-world challenges of launching a co-op and the transformative benefits co-ops offer to workers. It includes interviews with people who have launched their own co-ops.



Available since 2015, Own the Change has been watched nearly 35,000 times on YouTube, and has been screened in community centers and at organizing events around the country. There is also an accompanying education guide.

TESA collaborates with organizations to develop educational projects big or small from start to finish, and to improve existing programs, tools and curricula. The group can build custom games for a campaign, organization or company, merging cause with play. In addition to making games and programs for others, they design and produce their own games, including Rise up: The Game of People & Power, Co-opoly: The Game of Co-operatives, Loud & Proud: A Fast-Paced Social Justice Word Association Game, and Space Cats Fight Fascism: The Board Game.

Extra credit:
✓ What Is a Worker Cooperative? (Democracy At Work Institute/US Federation of Worker Cooperatives)
✓ When maximizing profits isn’t the only goal, companies can actually work better: Worker Cooperatives Are More Productive Than Normal Companies by Michelle Chen (The Nation)
✓ With new tools and political policies now in place to support them, there could be a boom in employee-owned business ahead as baby boomers retire and sell their companies to their workers: More U.S. businesses are becoming worker co-ops. Here’s why. by Eillie Anzilotti (FastCompany)
✓ Getting Rid of Bosses: Can a company succeed if no one is in charge? by Alana Semuels (The Atlantic)
✓ Why are we told a broken system that creates vast inequality is the only choice? Spain's amazing co-op is living proof otherwise: Yes, there is an alternative to capitalism. Mondragon shows the way Richard Wolff (The Guardian)

Resource: Worker Writers

Worker Writers, an institute founded and directed by poet Mark Nowak, organizes and facilitates poetry workshops with global trade unions, workers’ centers, and other progressive labor organizations. These workshops create a space for participants to re-imagine their working lives, nurture new literary voices directly from the global working class, and produce new tactics and imagine new futures for working class social change.

Worker Writers has run workshops with organizations as varied as Domestic Workers United in New York City, the National Union of Metalworkers of South Africa in Port Elizabeth and Pretoria, Justice for Domestic Workers in London, and the Indonesian Migrant Workers Union in Amsterdam and The Hague. For the past four years, Worker Writers has facilitated annual workshops for the PEN World Voices Festival.

Other links:
PEN American Center
Organization for Undocumented Workers
The Working-Class Studies Association supports scholarship, teaching and activism related to working-class life and cultures.

Organize!

Today is the birthday of Joe Hill (Oct. 7, 1879 – Nov. 19, 1915), a Swedish-American labor activist, songwriter, and member of the Industrial Workers of the World (IWW).

Read one of his songs (http://bit.ly/OfUQq9) and an online bio from KUED: http://bit.ly/WCghIT Artwork by Carlos Cortez, more info: http://bit.ly/OfUQq9

Are the Democratic Socialists of America For Real?

In the last year, the biggest American socialist organization has experienced a surge in membership. "As it builds on this momentum, there are several big questions facing DSA. What is its relationship to the Democratic Party? Should central leadership serve as administrators or ideological tone-setters? And how can its membership -- which skews white and male -- come to represent an increasingly diverse country?" In other words, can it can transform enthusiasm into real and effective political power?

Are the Democratic Socialists of America For Real? by Kate Aronoff (The New Republic, 2017-08-07)

This is what it looks like when people are sick and tired of being sick and tired.

                                                                             Roberta Penn ‏@StellaDean

"Thousands of people marched and rallied in the frigid streets of Raleigh, North Carolina on Saturday morning to demand a restoration of voting rights and voice broad support for a new progressive agenda to counter the current policies of Gov. Pat McCrory and the Republican-controlled state legislature.

"Organized by the Move Forward Together Movement and the North Carolina Chapter of the NAACP, led by Rev. William Barber III, the demonstration attracted a diverse coalition of individuals and organizations who say the systematic attack on state services—including healthcare and education—along with eroded democratic control and new voting restrictions, have disempowered and further marginalized the state's most vulnerable populations.

"'The right to vote is at the heart of our democracy,' Rev. Barber told the crowd."

The rest of the story:
Thousands Rally in North Carolina for 'Moral Imperative' of Voting Rights by Jon Queally (Common Dreams)

The nation’s largest private-sector employer is told to obey the law

A federal administrative law judge has ordered

Wal-Mart to offer 16 former workers their previous jobs and to make them "whole for any loss of earnings and other benefits suffered as a result of the discrimination against them." The company must also hold meetings in more than two dozen stores to inform workers of their rights to organize under U.S. labor law.

The rest of the story:
Wal-Mart strikes lawful, must reinstate workers: NLRB judge by Nathan Layne (Reuters).

Further reading:
How Walmart Keeps an Eye on Its Massive Workforce: The retail giant is always watching by Susan Berfield (Bloomberg Businessweek).

Life as a Wal-Mart worker -- and how its employees are monitored at all times: America’s real-life dystopia: Wal-Mart is straight out of George Orwell and Aldous Huxley by Aaron R. Hanlon (Salon).

“We are not anti-union; we are pro-associate”: A Manager's Toolbox To Remaining Union Free ("CONFIDENTIAL" Wal-Mart document) (source: ReclaimDemocracy.org).

The Wal-Mart Effect: How the World's Most Powerful Company Really Works--and How It's Transforming the American Economy by Charles Fishman (Amazon). "[T]he story of Wal-Mart is really the story of the transformation of the American economy over the past 20 years." Fishman is "careful to present the consumer benefits of Wal-Mart's staggering growth and to place Wal-Mart in the larger context of globalization and the rise of mega-corporations. But he also presents the case against Wal-Mart in arresting detail, and his carefully balanced approach only makes the downside of Wal-Mart's market dominance more vivid." -- Publisher's Weekly

The discount giant is closing 269 stores worldwide—and not even bothering to build stores it promised in poor neighborhoods: Can Cities Afford to Trust Walmart? by Kriston Capps (CityLab)

Extra credit:
This video is shown to all "associates" at on-boarding: it's imperative that everyone working for Wal-Mart understands that s/he is "better off" without a union.


The parody t-shirt at the top of this post and other merchandise is available from Reclaim Democracy!: "Reclaim Democracy! is dedicated to restoring democratic authority over corporations, reviving grassroots democracy, and establishing appropriate limits on corporate influence. We work for systemic change, instead of reacting to corporate agendas."

Flushing the PACs is not enough

We need to look no further than the current political dysfunction in the U.S. to see that without equality democracy is not viable.

But the problem with the effort to place a limit on campaign spending by moneyed interests is that it doesn't take us nearly far enough toward restoring equality of access to our political system. The 1% is buying power by stuffing dollars into PACs, yes; but wealth also acquires power in many other ways, direct, through bribes (contributions to individual campaigns, padded honorariums for speeches, make-work consultancies, donations to pet foundations, etc.) and indirect, through influential fronts (funding think tanks, academic studies, laboratory research, academic chairs, and so on), corporate advertising, and control of the mainstream media.

By itself, overturning Citizens United will not check the influence of money on politics.

In the past, political organizing helped the majority to defend its interests, but organizing is a long and difficult process, and in the last 40 years many of the mechanisms that were depended on to generate, accumulate and deploy the power of communities have either atrophied or been systematically destroyed (labor unions, to take one example). Somehow we must restore organizing to its central place in the political landscape if the many are ever again effectively to counter the power of the few.

The foremost reason to support Sen. Sanders for president is that he is the only major candidate in the race who recognizes that political inequality and economic injustice are major obstacles to further progress for this nation. Win or lose, Sen. Sanders' campaign, with its millions of donors and its fired-up activists, could be the beginning of a new era of people power.

Reading list:
Forty-three percent of likely Iowa Democratic caucus-goers self-identify as socialist -- to be very clear, the question is not whether they would vote for a socialist or sympathize with socialism; it's whether they consider themselves socialist -- more, actually, than the number who identify themselves as capitalist (38 %). This number proves Bernie Sanders can win Iowa by Aaron Blake (The Washington Post).

Extra credit:

via GIPHY

Organize!

Business as usual, which as each election day approaches expresses itself by the two major parties asserting to their constituencies that to vote for their nominee is to choose the lesser of two evils, has not served us well. For the past 40 years, as the Republicans and Democrats have traded control of the White House and Congress, the middle class has declined precipitously and millions of people have been recruited into the army of the poor, the infrastructure has decayed, and the quality of life of nearly all our citizens has declined, while billions of dollars of the nation's wealth has been transferred into private hands and squandered in military adventures. This state of affairs will be stopped, only can be stopped, when a majority of Americans refuses to join in this game, as 50% of potential voters who choose not to participate have already done. The problem with abstention, of course, is that someone wins anyway. This time around we have been offered a better way to break up the duopoly's hold on power. We ignore it at our peril.

FIGHT WAGE THEFT! Support garment workers organizing!

Garment Worker Center in Los Angeles invites all to join September 9, 2015 press conference and benefit performance of award winning play "Real Women Have Curves" at Pasadena Playhouse. FIGHT WAGE THEFT! Support garment workers organizing!

The story is not THAT citizens are in the streets. The question that needs to be addressed is WHY.

I think that we've got to see that a riot is the language of the unheard. -- Rev. Martin Luther King

The mainstream media is shocked -- shocked! -- by the damage caused by the protestors in Baltimore, but the real story is the grinding poverty and neglect wrought by capital and the powerlessness of citizens living under the thumb of oligarchy.

"Baltimore," Shawn Gude writes, "is like so many other cities with their own Freddie Grays: a place in which private capital has left enormous sections of the city to rot, where a chasm separates the life chances of black and white residents — and where cops brutally patrol a 'disposable' population."

(Photo: The Baltimore Sun)

Observers have long puzzled over the passivity of average Americans suffering impoverishment and disenfranchisement at the hands of a kleptocratic elite.

Is this the beginning of the American Spring?

The rest of the story: Why Baltimore Rebelled by Shawn Gude (Jacobin).
10,000 Strong Peacefully Protest In Downtown Baltimore, Media Only Reports The Violence & Arrest of Dozens by AJ Woodson (Black Westchester).
Eyewitnesses: The Baltimore Riots Didn't Start the Way You Think. Baltimore teachers and parents tell a different story from the one you've been reading in the media. By Sam Brodey and Jenna McLaughlin (Mother Jones)

Reading list: “A corrupt, unresponsive and plutocratic disaster”: How Mitch McConnell and the GOP remade Washington in their image. Now that the GOP's in control, Mitch McConnell is letting some things pass — and taking all the credit. By Elias Isquith (Salon).
Why So Many Americans Feel So Powerless by Robert Reich (robertreich.org).
American Political Passivity, Anti-Authoritarianism, and Building a Base by Bruce E. Levine (WarIsACrime).
Rise of the New Black Radicals by Chris Hedges (TruthDig).

Resource: Left Labor Project

"Left Labor Project works to build a mass movement of working people who share the goals of progressive movements across the country and the world. We believe that the real basis for a democratic future is the working class, in its diversity – all colors, ages, creeds, whatever sexual orientation or legal status, employed and unemployed. Within that shared view, we work through our differences, learn from one another, and look for flexible and effective strategies and tactics to change the city and the world for the better." Visit Left Labor Project.

Every important movement faces significant push-back

That doesn’t mean it won’t succeed.

One of the hardest things for activists to hold in mind is that they are not alone. Most people, however well-intentioned, will wait for what Martin Luther King called a "more convenient season" to move to action. So the activist must not only organize but represent.

'It’s worth remembering that the civil rights protesters of the 1950s and ’60s faced as much derision then as the Ferguson and New York protesters do today … probably more. In 1964, the American National Election Studies, as part of its biennial survey, began asking Americans whether they thought civil rights leaders “are trying to push too fast, are going too slowly, or are … moving about the right speed.” The responses are most telling. Among whites, 84 percent of Southerners, and 64 percent of non-Southerners, said that civil rights leaders were pushing too fast."

The rest of the story: For most, there's never a right time to protest by Seth Masket (Pacific-Standard)

Where is Big Bill Haywood when you need him?

The Wobblies were right.

Workers of the world, and nearly everyone else, must unite against the predator class that will otherwise enslave and finally destroy the planet.

Labor Day!

“Never forget, people DIED for the eight hour workday.” — Rebecca Gordon

This poster is from the fabulous Ricardo Levins Morales Art Studio.

Act like a national party

The Democrats should use their pac money for a national congressional campaign; instead of backing a few potential "winners" here and there, they should tie the GOP's reactionary majority to its truly lunatic fringe, turn every vote in the country into a judgement on Republican radicalism, make it clear that you can't have that nice Monica Wehby in Oregon, say, without getting Joni Ernst, the new Republican nominee for Iowa’s Senate seat, who is anti-amnesty for immigrants, hates the Nixon-backed Clean Water Act, and wants to privatize Social Security.

Actually, Monica Wehby doesn't seem that nice, but you get my point.

Class Unconsciousness

President Obama has gotten a lot of free advice since Nov 6 from progressives who think he should refocus his attentions on their priorities. But why should he? Since, when it appeared he needed them, they volunteered their support for his reelection without demanding anything in return, why should he now feel obligated to take their wishes seriously?

When he was first running for president, then Sen. Obama repeated the famous story about a delegation of progressives, led by the great labor organizer A. Philip Randolph of the railroad porters' union, meeting with another newly elected president, Franklin Delano Roosevelt. The delegation described the things they believed FDR needed to do to help fix the economy and improve the situation of ordinary citizens. As the story is told, FDR listened intently, then replied: 'I agree with everything you have said. Now, make me do it.'

Making Obama "do it" is going to take a lot more than op-ed pieces, open letters and online petitions. To move this administration in a more progressive direction, to overcome its leader's native caution and to beat back the relentless pressure it is under from the corporate class and the military-security state apparatus will require an equal or greater pressure from a national movement demanding economic justice and a restoration of the middle class. Such a movement can only be built if the identification that currently exists between the 99% and their oppressors can be broken. In other words, until Americans become class conscious there will never be a reason for Obama, or any politician, to do anything other than carry on with business as usual.

Building class consciousness won't happen -- can't happen -- by recruiting people to join the Peace and Freedom Party or the Greens (although third party mechanisms will be necessary in the future as the country continues its decline under the Democratic-Republican duopoly, so it's to be hoped that Jill Stein's paltry 396,684 tally is enough to keep the Green Party on state ballots). But class consciousness can be built by engaging in practical political work in our communities.

There are a number of local issues that are looming (or that are chronic, is more like it) -- repairing the public schools; providing universal access to public institutions of higher learning; keeping hospital emergency rooms and clinics open and accessible; raising local minimum wages to livable levels; restraining public transportation costs and assuring availability; resisting hand-outs to developers; opposing the crushing of local businesses by big-box stores and malls; increasing infrastructure spending; making state and local taxes more progressive; supporting labor actions by janitors, hotel workers, grocery clerks, teachers, factory workers -- that offer opportunities for common-sense, real-world discussions about capitalism and economic and social justice.

Also, reforms that would make our political system more democratic and thus more responsive to the majority -- weekend voting; instant run-offs; proportional representation; public financing of elections -- will only gain traction if they are tested and proven effective on the local level. And that won't happen, either, unless that majority begins to understand whose interests are served by the creaky, calcified, undemocratic political mechanism we use now.

This is not to say that we should give up attempting to affect national issues -- the security state; the war machine; our murderous and counter-productive foreign policy; the immoral drone campaign; climate change; free trade; protecting and expanding Medicare, Medicaid, and Social Security; the private health care insurance gravy train; control of the government by oligarchs; the kleptocracy -- but these are matters for discussion and op-ed pages; organizing around them will only make sense when people active locally begin to connect the dots between community concerns and macro issues, and local organizations join together to demand change on these national issues.

The Democratic Party as a whole has moved steadily to the right for four decades. But many people within the party who share our goals are potential allies in local fights; these engaged people also need and deserve support when they resist the pro-business, anti-labor forces that dominate the party. After the "change" election in 2008, many on the left suffered buyer's remorse when Obama adopted a business-as-usual attitude toward governing (and doubled-down on many of Bush's worst security-state policies); yet four-years later they found themselves with seemingly no choice but to push once again for the lesser-of-two-evils option. If we're going to use our limited personal energies in electoral politics going forward, it should be in local races and political institutions where we can build trust with our communities and demonstrate concrete results. If this country is going to begin down a new road, the journey will start at Neighborhood Watch and the PTA, in community organizations, planning commissions and city councils. Not only is it possible to make concrete changes in our lives at the micro-political level, but local successes will demonstrate the practical worth of our ideas.

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